JPMorgan Chase to cut 9,200 WaMu jobs

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – JPMorgan Chase said Monday it plans to lay off 9,200 employees at Washington Mutual, the failed savings and loan that the New York City-based banking giant bought in September.
Once the largest savings and loan in the country, Seattle-based WaMu collapsed due to bad bets on mortgages, resulting in the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
As of the end of the third quarter, JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) reported that Washington Mutual had nearly 42,000 employees. So the 9,200 job cuts represent more than 20% of WaMu’s headcount at the time that it failed.
JPMorgan will slash 3,400 WaMu employees in Seattle, according to JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Christine Holevas. That comes on top of the 1,600 job cuts in Pleasanton and San Francisco, CA, which the company announced last week.
The remaining 4,200 WaMu positions will come from offices nationwide, Holevas said. She added that most branch workers will keep their jobs since the layoffs are mostly at the corporate level.